Information regarding corporate entities, and individuals employed by those corporate entities, is highly valuable information for potential and actual suppliers, customers and competitors of a corporate entity. Specifically, the sales department of a seller corporation is usually interested in locating individuals at a potential customer corporation who can be contacted to discuss a possible relationship between the seller corporation and the customer corporation. Further, information regarding individuals within a particular corporate entity may be very useful to corporate recruiters.
To meet the demand for business information (e.g., individual and corporate contact information), a number of companies offer such information services. For example, the Hoover's Inc, a Dun and Bradstreet Company, has provided information on US companies and industries since 1990, originally only in print form, but since '93 via its website, Hoover's Online. The Dun and Bradstreet Corporation is a leading provider of business information, and its major divisions are Risk Management Solutions, Sales and Marketing Solutions, Supply Management Solutions, and e-Business Solutions. In order to gather and keep current a collection of business information that rapidly changes, business information companies are required to employ a large number of researchers and analysts, and also to employ sophisticated data gathering technologies.
Social networking services have also emerged as a valuable avenue for users to locate jobs, people and business opportunities. Such social network services typically deploy specialized software to focus on building and verifying social networks for a number of purposes, including business purposes. LinkedIn.com is an example of such an Internet-based social network service, and enables users to locate other users who may be useful to them for business purposes, and that may be connected (by varying degrees) to the seeking users' social network. Such social network services may encourage a user to upload their address book to the social network service. Software deployed by the social network service then matches the entries within the uploaded address book to entries within its database in order to establish connections.
In addition to contact information relating to corporate entities, other business and corporate information may be extremely valuable to external entities. Examples of such information include head count, revenue and organizational structure information. Such information may or may not be published by a particular corporate entity. For example, where the corporate entity is a private entity, such information may be hard to obtain. Accordingly, it is a challenge to the business information companies to gather and publish such information to their customers.
It will also be appreciated that there are a number of technical challenges and difficulties in maintaining a large body of business information. This information, as noted above, is continually evolving. Accordingly, the information gathering systems employed by business information companies typically are required to provide researchers and analysts with access to a large number of sources from which current business information can be a gleaned. The provision of such access, and the management of the resulting data traffic and storage requirements, presents a number of technical challenges.